1963-2009-1944
The film is released. Michael Paryla advances through the train compartment to compartment, swaying side to side, and I watch him as the camera does; through the director’s eyes. The shot is well established. It is Germany, March 1944, the 11th anniversary of Hitler’s rise to power as Supreme Ruler. Sturges the American is working magic with history. Stalag Luft III is the stuff of legend. Ja, Ja. Das ist Deutschland and Michael Paryla is the blond bimbo on the train. My cousin moves through the cars, no fuss, single-mindedly, with the casual swagger of a superior race. Swaying not much, not much at all because by this point, after a full day of shooting, running up and down the Munich-Hamburg line, he’s got his sea legs.
Whenever I watch this scene, I’m irked by the knowledge that John Sturges, who planned the shoot, didn’t see half of it. Sturges shot plot and his actors with methods. He shot the superficial. Sturges had his own technique of lining up the camera and his actors on the set. Yet for all his alleged experience at teasing out the idiosyncrasies of secondary characters, Sturges let Michael Paryla go easy. Michael Paryla as a Nazi, on the map, not thirty years after his parents fled by train through the same neck of the woods: who catches this on film?
I see Michael Paryla making his career move, juxtaposed with more innocents than it makes sense to count, aboard a modified train, like the one rented by the film crew from the German Rail Bureau, riding the death fugue.
1 I like to imagine the tower guards, in winter, dressed in great coats, pacing the observation platforms, while over in the warmth of the commandant’s office, their administrative counterparts—comfortably seated and wearing air-tight headphones: straining like hard-of-hearing war criminals—listened through nightlong shifts to the latest underground recording, the esoteric distortions of some segmented worm licking its way inside the shell of a seismograph. Talk about Lo-Fi. Talk ‘bout
avant-garde.
2 Spoiler. To limit mistakes and errors where the movie and movie-making is concerned, I have enlisted the services of a professor of film studies, whom I shall henceforth refer to by his moniker, ‘The Filmfuehrer’, in honour of the vigilant Trapfuehrers of Stalag Luft III.
3 Dreadfully quaint disclaimers like this one, which follows the opening credits of the movie, are a thing of the past.
4 Nota bene. The fact that Michael’s mother, Eva, born in Breslau, learned of her Mischling status in 1935, after the invention of Nuremberg Laws, and fled by train to Vienna, quite possibly along the very rail lines represented in the movie, puts him, Michael, the conscientious Gestapo man, in the stranger-than-fiction bin. There is no evidence BTW that Attenborough and Jackson—fine products of the Mirisch Brothers forgery factory—knew anything about this, i.e. Michael’s family history and how often it runs parallel but never nicks the illusion of historical accuracy.
5 What does this reveal? Henri-Cartier Bresson served in a photo unit of the French Army until he was captured by the Germans during the Battle of France (1940). After two unsuccessful attempts, Bresson escaped on his third try from a prisoner-of-war camp inside Germany. He found his way back to France and served in the French Resistance, joining a group that helped escaped POWs until the end of the war.
6 Voila, Brickhill’s fine description of how Johnny Travis, the real manufacturer and camp smithy, made the aforementioned wire clippers from tie bars ripped off the huts “ … in a home-made forge he heated the clippers till they were red hot, poured a few grains of sugar on the metal around cutting notches, and heated it up again so the carbon in the sugar baked into the metal. Then he plunged it into cold water, and steel came out hard enough to cut wire.” The ingenuity never ceases.
7 A counter-intuitive chestnut: the actor is never so vulnerable (never more revealed) as when pulling an alien self over his or her own. Acting is a mask that eats away at the face.
8 Trust me, I got this from a reliable source and made copious notes from which I am cribbing quasi-verbatim. Seems I might be suffering from some researcher’s over-my-head-in-this-gunk incipient blindness regarding copyright infringement; this malady coupled with a growing sense of impotence versus the compelling veracity of the primary material.
9 Trust me on this, too, stuntmen can pretty well do what they want since nobody else wants to do what it is they do.
10 ‘The Tunnel Kings’ has a rockabilly ring. John Leyton, one of the Kings, had a Number 1 hit on the UK Singles Chart with “Johnny Remember Me” in 1961. Leyton did teen idol pop with a Wild West feel.
11 Unlike James Garner who rejected my appeal for an interview after his manager did or did not have cocktails with my ‘hired’ celebrity wrangler in Toronto at a TIFF event in 2010, John Leyton, a perfect gentleman, responded positively to an interview request in 2011. I’ll be releasing excerpts from this exclusive interview in the following pages.
12 Then what is a skiff? My question, exactly.
13 The same Arthur Nebe was implicated as a conspirator in the Hitler bomb plot of July 1944, and hanged, wikipediately, by piano wire.
14 When I begin to tell acquaintances the Michael Paryla story, give the outlines, say, at a dinner party, people inevitably think of the representative scene in the movie and of the Gestapo man who intercepts Richard Attenborough and Gordon Jackson as they are about to board a bus in a nondescript Germany city. This Gestapo man and the smug little trick he plays on the disguised escapees is a crowd pleaser. When I confess that my relative is not this Gestapo but another, ‘he’s the guy who … ’ , the reaction is not good. Curiosity crumples into disappointment. If only your Michael was that other guy, then you’d have a real story on your hands.
15 In case you want to know, and so you don’t begin your own manhunt: Leopol Span was killed in April 1945 during an air raid on Linz. Emil Schulz was found under a false identity in Saarbrucken and was hanged at Hamelin 27 February 1948. The driver Breithaupt was ‘given life’ on 3 September 1947.
Deutsche Bahn ICE 164
TRAVEL BY TRAIN IS AN EXCUSE FOR BEING. Thirty travel writers agree. Between stations the self reports to nobody in particular. Ask Paul Theroux, whose dreamed truths are as good as Freud’s. ‘Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.’ Sounds very quaint, somewhat pat, but you know what he meant, and even if I don’t know where I am going with this now, it doesn’t matter because the real tripping happens horizontally, out the side window of the train.
Welcome aboard Deutsche Bahn ICE 164, leaving München Hauptbahnhof for Hamburg Bahnhof with stops in: Ingolstadt: Nürnberg: Würzburg: Fulda: Kassel-Wilhemlshöhe: Göttingen: Hannover: Uelzen: Lüneberg, Hamburg.
Michael’s scenes in The Great Escape were filmed on this rail line between Munich and Hamburg, an active route in the summer of 1962. The German Railroad Bureau collaborated kindly with the film crew, finding Sturges a passenger coach from the era. A railroad engine was rented and two condemned cars were modified to house the camera equipment. The passenger coach was fitted with platforms to support arc lamps, which illuminated the train interiors with its precious cargo of Attenborough, Pleasance, Jackson, Garner et al. On the flat car, Sturges mounted his Chapman crane, which was designed to swing out over the passenger coach. It would be used to film the scene where stunt doubles for James Garner and Donald Pleasance jump from the train. This happens after Gestapo great, Michael Paryla, and his lumpen sidekicks, drive them to desperation. Especially James Garner: more than any other on the train he reacts strongly to the sight of Michael Paryla. More reason to Skype him and not someone like the blind and deceased Donald Pleasance.
The second to last car was reserved for Wardrobe. Here, Bert Hendrikson’s crew languished. What they got up to is anyone’s guess. Maybe an S&M-themed Nazi-regalia dress party. These things were very rock n’ roll back in the day. Very
outlaw, very Easy Rider. What we know they did not get up to is finding cousin Michael a properly fitting trench coat. His sleeves are very short.
The Filmfuehrer, my go-to film studies advisor, offers this angle on the origin of Michael’s ill-fitting costume: “What we seem to be dealing with is an actor who did not look good in the rushes or didn’t sound right to the director being bumped for your relative, and then the director just winged it, not hard since the lines are short. These things are done in a minute, especially at the end of the day if the light is changing.”
A workable hypothesis. Michael was fluent in German, and had functional French. He knew the historical background material like the back of his hand. He could have improvised, no problem. And the informality of process, the spur of the moment change in plans, would explain why he’d been stuck with a kid’s-size jacket, with sleeves that exposed plenty of forearm and wrist. Bert Hendrickson had done the costumes for The Magnificent Seven (1960) and West Side Story (1961). So, he had run his measuring tape a long distance over the stars. Why then so drastically short-sleeve the Gestapo on the train? Because Hendrickson had sized the coat for a different actor. That must be it. In a flash, Michael graduated from extra to bit player. He was in the right place at the right time. His lines do not match James Clavell’s draft screenplay of 26 April 1962, because Michael was winging it.
My mind is racing. Meanwhile, The Filmfuehrer has not stopped feeding me the insider angle:
If an actor feels good to the director on the set, or they look good in rushes, they will get bumped up. Or, if the director improvises, they may just bubble up through the baseline energy of the scene. In none of these cases do they have lines written for them, so they are not involved in the casting for ‘parts’ which is based on the shooting script, and from which actors and/or their agents negotiate contracts. This includes credits.
Michael had no agent as far as I know. But is that likely?
The shooting was squeezed between actual runs. Inside the radio car, the rail bureau operator received signals from further down the line. When the radio operator alerted the engineer and crew to traffic on the main line, Sturges et al. retreated to a siding, where they could watch passenger cars like the one I’m riding today sail by at eighty miles per hour.
The youthful DB ticket collector is wearing a black cap and a blue short-sleeved shirt under a navy vest. He is unshaven. His red necktie hangs limply, a casual formality.
“Bitte, ein Frage?” I bring him to attention.
“Ja, Natürlich … ” He can be of help, naturally. An official of the state rail bureau, dressed in the drag of the Dairy Queen or Burger King.
“Where will I find the restaurant?”
“Closed today—unfortunately for you. There was a power failure. But, shortly, we will serve hot pretzels.”
I frown and at the same time ask myself WWJD? What Would Joerg Do in a situation like this. A power failure on Deutsche Bahn ICE? This is not The FGW, or is it now?
The train goes through Ingolstadt, birthplace of Frankenstein’s monster and also where Audis are polished and made precise, and Würzburg, destroyed more thoroughly than Dresden and, wikipediately, in just seventeen minutes by 225 British Lancaster bombers. And Nuremberg, who can forget Nuremberg, where the Nazis partied under Albert Speer’s architecture of light. It is nothing spectacular on a Sunday morning. Nuremberg. Nothing special. BMW dealer, placards for the SPD, radio towers, tiled rooftops, football pitches, nondescript industries, Autobahn entry ramp, sparse woods, fields and then forest.
Alles Normal. Nothing out of the ordinary.
“Pretzel?”
Nuremberg is where Rudolf Steiner, founder of anthroposophy and spiritual father of the Waldorf School, gave his February 1918 lecture ‘The Dead Are With Us’. The Waldorf School that Michael attended during the war was in Switzerland. In Germany, the Nazis shut them down. Too radical for The FGW. Hitler was hostile to Steiner’s mystical philosophy, which he associated with the Jewish frame of mind.
“Nein, danke.”
No pretzel now. I have no appetite. I’m busy scrawling notes. Giddy with an experience tied to its own documentation, which is not what it ought to be, pure experience, but something electrifying nonetheless. So what if you cannot observe yourself in the moment without changing yourself in the moment. At least there is movement and, however minor, metamorphosis. It must be why actors so often find themselves in front of the mirror. Here I am. No, it’s not me. Catch him if you can.
The living are not always with it, but according to Rudolf Steiner the dead are with us. Correction. The ‘so-called dead’. Once they pass through the gate of death, Steiner’s so-called dead bide time awaiting karmic resolution and rebirth. Steiner believed without an iota of doubt in reincarnation. But notice, again according to Steiner, that reincarnation takes its own sweet time. In the meantime Steiner strongly recommended reading to the dead in order to help them develop their soul, between death and rebirth.1 In the lecture ‘The Living and the Dead’, given in Berlin in February 1918, during what must have been Steiner’s Germany-wide Clairvoyant Consciousness Tour, he outlines the correct method for reading to the dead. This is handy because reading to the dead is not first nature, and to this day among the so-called living there remains confusion concerning The Freaky Steiner Way. Listen to what Dr. Ernst Katz had to say in 2004 during his address given at the American Anthroposophy Society’s General Meeting:
I have been asked whether one should read aloud or silently. What matters to the departed soul is what goes on in your conscious mind. He or she picks up the thoughts and feelings of what is being read. Many people can only hold a thought clearly in their mind when they read aloud slowly. So that is what they should do. When such people read silently they skip through the pages and do not dwell with sufficient intensity on the thoughts they are reading. Other people do not know what they are reading when they read aloud. All their energy goes into pronouncing the words. For them it is better to read silently and try to understand every sentence. At first one should read in the language that was closest to the departed soul in life, usually the mother tongue. After a few years, one can read in any language, as long as one understands the thoughts and meaning of the words one is reading. Rudolf Steiner speaks here of five years.
A second bridge between the living and the dead is based on the possibility of asking questions of a departed soul and receiving answers. The questions must be of a soul-spiritual nature, not of a materialistic kind. It is best to entertain the question when one goes to sleep, but it can also be done during the day …
Steiner is quite precise about scheduling any communication with the so-called dead at dusk or at twilight. It appears that in these hours, in a drowsy and liminal state, both the living and the dead are at their most gullible. I’m inclined to ponder this in relation to prose fiction, and in particular in relation to the social contract between so-called writers and so-called readers, in which the latter group conveniently agrees to play dead and suspend disbelief at the title page. Curiously this arrangement does not motivate in the writer ambivalence toward truth, nor does it render the reader more easy to fool, which is surprising. And counter-intuitive. Which leads me back to the early days of the War on Michael. Sometime ago it occurred to me that what pushes people to falsify and invent lies is precisely the pressure to tell the truth.
In addition to being read to, the dead have work to do. It’s not all Facebook and Tumblr.2 According to Rudolf Steiner ‘after the death of the physical body, the human spirit recapitulates the past life, perceiving events as they were experienced by the objects of its actions.’ I personally like this idea of a formal and systematic review of each our actions from the point of view of the other, as part of the prerequisite to receiving your karmic benefit package for the next life. It is something the so-called living should practise as well: treating others as we ourselves expect to be treated. This
part of spiritual rehabilitation makes good sense and forms a major part of The FSW.
Michael attended a Rudolf Steiner school in Zurich during the war, but now I’m thinking it’s possible he was sent from Berlin to boarding school in Habkern, through the years 1946-48. His letter to ‘Georg’ implies something of the kind. Whichever years it was, going to a Steiner school does seem to have made a lasting impression on him. And why not? Steiner’s way regards thinking as an organ of perception through which the direct experience of a spiritual world can be reached. Anthroposophy privileges the faculties of perceptive imagination, inspiration, and intuition—in combination, these faculties cultivate a form of thinking independent of our senses. Steiner’s spiritual philosophy potentially has a lot to offer someone with an artistic temperament.
Steiner’s writings are bewitching. Even if the mystic is a quack, I can tolerate bonkers better than Das Boring. Anthroposophy gives me something to ponder on the train, and I wonder now if Steiner’s brand of mysticism had any influence on Michael’s ‘development’. And yet, what can you say about these things? Hindsight is a trap. There is the tendency to read too much into the so-called lives of the dead. In any case, the WoM is something that started long ago and long before I had even heard about Rudolf Steiner and his impossible anthroposophy. In other words, I started talking to the so-called dead Michael before I knew it ever might be fashionable to do so. It was Michael’s ex-girlfriend Janine who put me on the Steiner trail originally, referencing him during a conversation we had about Eva and Antoine, and about Michael’s schooling.
This Great Escape Page 12
